Bevin Boy

National Service in the Pits 1945-48

Roly Gingell (38-43)

T DOES seem
rather ironic, having
put in three years in the school's ATC squadron, that when the time
came for call-up, at age 18, Ernie Bevin, the Minister for Labour and
National Service, conscripted me to work in a coal mine ! So I went
down the pits rather than up with the R.A.F.

Thus I found myself at Oakdale Colliery near Blackwood, South
Wales undergoing a month of intensive training on how to use a shovel
and all aspects of safety underground, which is a very dangerous
place. At the end of that training I was sent further west into Wales
to work in the Rhondda Valley at the Bertie Pit of the Lewis Merthyr
Colliery, which is now a Rhondda Hertiage Museum at Trehafod.

I was handed out to Tom, an experience miner and we drove a
heading through a 6-8 feet seam of coal. We worked the afternoon
shift going down about at 2pm and coming up at 10. We were 520yards
down, 2 miles in with a 1500 ft mountain on top. Strangely I never
gave it a thought. Later, Tom was badly injured by a horse crushing
him and was invalided out of the pit leaving me at a loose end, as it
were. I did odd jobs with people who needed a shovelling body on the
day shift, none of which tasks I took kindly to, so when a notice
appeared on the colliery office board advertising day release at
Mining School I quietly applied and was accepted in spite of being
English !

Mining School

I attended Mining School one day a week and became a sort of minor
official at the pit responsible for keeping a record of what the
colliers did each day, so that when the under-manager made his round
of the face on Friday he would agree with the collier in his
workplace how much he should be paid. The rates were based on the
square yardage of coal cleared, the thickness of the seam, the amount
of shale between the seam and the hard rock roof and any extra work
he had had to do to make his place safe. The measurements always led
to mistrust and dispute. It was always assumed that I had fiddled the
tape measurements in the management's favour.

One day I was called in for a interview with a Doctor from the
Medical Research Council. They were investigating the high incidence
of dust diseases in the valleys and needed people with underground
experience to use fairly delicate instruments to collect samples of
dust and air for their studies. I was accepted for the job and
benefitted from a shorter working day, extra pay and transport to and
from the hostel where we were working that day. It lasted about four
months at the end of which I returned to my colliery.

Now I began recording 'time and motion' on new machinery that had
been brought into the pit to try new methods of coal extraction. This
was being done on a 24-hour cycle so I was working days, afternoons
and night shifts in rotation. For various reasons this equipment was
not entirely successful and the district reverted to long-wall face
working.

A new method of roof support was brought in for trial. This
involved the spoil, which, instead of being dumped on surface tips,
was crushed, mixed with water and taken back to be packed into the
space where coal had been removed. This was done by blowing the
slurry with compressed air to form a wall four and a half feet thick
running parallel with the coal face. In a way it was an early form of
conservation by doing away with unsightly tips above ground. As this
system used all the compressed air that the pit could produce it was
done at night when all other equipment was still.

By this time I was permanently on the night shift and I had
already had to give up the day release for Mining School as I could
not study AND work nights. Trigonometry, algebra and geometry had
been my weak subjects at school and these were needed for the
surveying part of the mining exams. Trying to pick this up as I went
along in class AND work nights was not possible. So I gave up the
studies and worked nights until demob came in February 1948. Freedom
at last ! My days in the pits were over. I was still a young man and
looked forward to a new career and a full life back in my own county.
A life in the pits was not for me.

"How green is my valley"

But now let us go forward to 1995. On a chance visit to
Weston-Super-Mare, I met up with one of my old fellow Bevin Boys who
had been in our hut at the hostel for those three years. We set about
searching for the others who had been with us. This took a couple of
years but we traced and met up with six of the seven. We made several
trips back to Wales seeking the pits where we had all worked. Now
green fieds grow where the collieries had been. Only the odd
ventilation pipes sticking out if the ground mark their whereabouts.
The hostel has gone and now there is a playing field. Trees grow
where the tips had been and only one small colliery remains in the
whole of the valley - now owned and run by the miners themselves. One
would hardly guess or believe what had been there in the valley fifty
years ago.